Will Google or Apple Disrupt Intel?

Google, Apple, or a smart startup could unseat Intel in microprocessors, the microprocessor design veteran Davd Ditzel said after an interview about his Hot Chips paper.

Google, Apple, or a smart startup could disrupt Intel, which increasingly looks awkwardly poised as the world's largest maker of microprocessors.

That's the view of Dave Ditzel, a veteran microprocessor designer. I talked to him about the microprocessor landscape after an interview for his upcoming paper at Hot Chips.

Ditzel led Sparc designs at the former Sun Microsystems before founding his own startup, Transmeta, that designed an x86-compatible chip. Most recently, he spent a little time at Intel on a microprocessor design that apparently got the axe from Brian Krzanich, Intel's new CEO. So he's been around the block and has something of an underdog's perspective.

Google may undermine Intel's x86 in servers with its work with IBM on the OpenPower Consortium, Ditzel said, and he makes a good case. The search company could probably save a lot of money and maybe even gain some performance/watt advantages if it could come up with a custom Power design for its data centers.

We know from seeing job reqs that Google has been hiring circuit designers and other kinds of chip engineers. Google's head of data center server technology leads the OpenPower group and has shown custom Power board designs.

I'm skeptical because I know Google tries everything and has the cash to do it. Nevertheless, Ditzel helped me see it also has the motive to make something real here that could deprive Intel of many hundreds of thousands of Xeon sales a year.

If Google gets something working, it might motivate Amazon, Facebook, and other big data center companies to follow. These folks represent 20% of the server business -- the hungry 20%.

Apple could put one of its next-generation A-series SoCs in a MacBook Air in the not-too-distant future, Ditzel said. Once it got the SoC up and running on its full Mac OS, it could easily spread use of the chip to other Mac notebooks and eventually desktops.

That's not a game changer for Intel, but it's another loss of x86 sockets and part of a scenario of death by a thousand cuts.

Finally, Ditzel said there's ample opportunity for a startup to do something really kick butt in microprocessors these days.

"Most of mainstream microprocessor design has slowed to a crawl. It's not happening at big companies, because they have lost the ability to design new architectures," he said, perhaps unconsciously thinking about his last project.

Multicore designs are running out of gas, given the lack of parallelism in most software. Nevertheless, "there are several really interesting opportunities for new microprocessors."

One path is in designing the first SoC from the ground up for 3D stacks, he said. No surprise there, given Ditzel is now working with ThruChip Communications, a startup with an inductive coupling technique for chip-to-chip communications.

"No one knows the details yet, but it looks like this may be first big disclosure," Ditzel said. "It's been a long time coming."

The project, believed to be Nvidia's first general-purpose CPU, was expected to be x86-based but now is reportedly a 64-bit ARM SoC. In this era when so many companies, including Intel's old rival AMD, are jumping on the ARM bandwagon for everything from mobile systems to servers, Denver may not be that disruptive in the long run.

There's no doubt Intel is on shaky ground, given its core PC market has slowed to a crawl, and the company still has not made significant progress in hot mobile markets where Qualcomm is king. For now, I'm keeping my eyes on Google, some still stealthy startup, or maybe those RISC-V folks at Berkeley for the next big disruption in microprocessors.

While Intel processors are hot, obviously they are not "melting" in commercial products. Yes heat management is an issue and yes better heat sinking can be translated into better performance."

Jack, if you Google the quote in my OP, you will find it gets at least two hits in major media, & one is still online.

I am sure you believe that your design is 3x better than anything else and perhaps it is, but odds are it is not.

That is correct; however I have been inventing for many years, I have confidence in my designs. My record is not too shabby. You may care to Google "Local inventor wins 3 prestigious awards"

No doubt there are many many inventors in your space who believe the same thing. I have been around technology for ... well too many decades now and the number of times I have had a better mousetrap promoted to me that was not really, I have lost count.

I have measured the performance of my hand built prototype, & checked it against the best others, as listed on the only website to provide a true figure of merit for performance (∆T, in ˙C/W) for their coolers tested. The best commercially available non exotic (no heat pipes, peltiers etc) on their website showed 0.44˚C/W; my cooler test produced a figure of 0.167˚C/W.

- Network, work the phone, whatever it took to get a meeting with as close to the right person at Intel (if that was to be my lead customer) as possible such that my idea gets the proper attention, not just gets lumped in with the other mouse traps.

I went to the annual conference in Boston & met many in the industry, including an Asian American gentleman who was said to be Intels' Senior Thermal Scientist. We exchanged cards and I subsequently sent to him at Intel some non specific information about my cooler, such as performance. This was with a view to working with them in one way or the other, to solve their 'melting' problem.

I found that this information was almost immediately communicated to my competitor, without reference to me.

I would not send any material unsolicited without any prior contact and if I did, I would not have any expectation of confidentiality as I had not establshed any.

If I received unsolicited sales material (and I receive a lot), most of the time I would delete it, and if something interesting caught my eye, I would probably ask people I know associated with similar technology if they had seen anything like it and to comment on validity.

Unsolicited, yes, but not without prior contact. Also, one does not fly to the other side of the planet on a hunch.

Still keen to hear, Jack, how it is patently obvious to you that the problem will be the inventor.

While Intel processors are hot, obviously they are not "melting" in commercial products. Yes heat management is an issue and yes better heat sinking can be translated into better performance.

I am sure you believe that your design is 3x better than anything else and perhaps it is, but odds are it is not. No doubt there are many many inventors in your space who believe the same thing. I have been around technology for ... well too many decades now and the number of times I have had a better mousetrap promoted to me that was not really, I have lost count.

- Network, work the phone, whatever it took to get a meeting with as close to the right person at Intel (if that was to be my lead customer) as possible such that my idea gets the proper attention, not just gets lumped in with the other mouse traps.

I would not send any material unsolicited without any prior contact and if I did, I would not have any expectation of confidentiality as I had not establshed any.

If I received unsolicited sales material (and I receive a lot), most of the time I would delete it, and if something interesting caught my eye, I would probably ask people I know associated with similar technology if they had seen anything like it and to comment on validity.

One would only need to show that what was said was true to defend a charge of slander or libel.

It may be that Intel agree with me that they can't be trusted - I have been posting the above for 4 -5 years now, with an invitation for them to provide any evidence to the contrary. If my phone doesn't ring, I know it's them not calling to apologise - again.

Tell me, Jack, what would you do if your CPUs were melting, and an inventor contacted you with an offer to solve your problem?

Given what you have wrote and the lack of clarity which you wrote it, then I find what you posted almost slanderous against Intel and perhaps with good reason.

It founds like you sent them information unsolicited without any legal standing with them and yet expected some sort of legal protection? Unsolicited information is about as close to public domain as you can get so if they forwarded information, why be surprised. How would they even know who your competitor was. Perhaps they were trying to do you a favour by pointing your technology towards a company that may be interested in licensing and manufacturing it?

If you feel that patent attorneys are not worth their money due to them not giving you the answers you want, then perhaps you need to consider what your expectations are? I would much rather invite and have someone expert in the system help with write great patents versus trust myself in something I am not an expert on, but that is just me.